1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for determining highlight segments of a sport video, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for determining the highlight segments of the sport video more accurately by verifying correctness of recognized scoreboard characteristics through a user interface in advance.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In recent years, due to the popularity of sport activities, watching sports videos has been an important and popular recreation in daily life. However, since broadcast sports videos generally last several hours, viewers are often impatient at the preparation time of athletes, time-out durations or the redundant advertisements. Thus, the viewers nowadays often record the sport videos in advance, so that they can fast-forward the boring segments or can trace back and forth to search highlight segments such as a home run in a baseball game, a shot in a soccer game or an ace in a tennis game, etc, instead of viewing the entire game.
Moreover, with the development of multimedia technology, the sport videos can further be analyzed for extracting desired events or interesting highlights automatically by some image processing tools. Some conventional methods can determine the highlights based on special sounds or inherent image characteristics in the sport videos. For example, by analyzing the special sounds like whistling, horns or the applauses of the audiences in the sport videos, exciting events like foul plays, game-over or scorings can be detected. In addition, analyzing the image characteristics in the sport videos can also determine highlights of the sport videos.
Please refer to FIG. 1, which shows an image frame 100 of a sport video displayed on a screen. The image frame 100 includes main content of the sport video and a scoreboard image 110 on an upper right corner. The scoreboard image 110 represents a current status of a sport game in the sport video, and has a plurality of scoreboard characteristics such as a playing clock 120, a game period 122, an offense status 124, a ball location 126 and a foul flag 128 when taking an American football game for example.
In the prior art, the special sounds and the image characteristics in the sport videos have to be identified in advance so as to perform the following highlight determination. However, the highlights or exciting events cannot be identified correctly enough. In this case, the users have to trace back and forth to search the highlight segments manually, which significantly causes inconvenience of the users and reduces delights when watching the sport videos.